"When I saw the second movie, I wasn't impressed with what we did," LaBeouf said Thursday before the world premiere of his finance drama "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps."

On the second "Transformers" movie, "We got lost. We tried to get bigger. It's what happens to sequels. It's like, how do you top the first one? You've got to go bigger," LaBeouf said. "You lost a bit of the relationships. Unless you have those relationships, then the movie doesn't matter. Then it's just a bunch of robots fighting each other."

Yup, there was plenty of that. "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" was a runaway commercial success but was drubbed by critics and really any above a second-grade reading level.

The star promised to do better for the third edition which begins filming on Tuesday. With "Transformers 3," the toll of the robot war will be grave for our planet, LaBeouf said.

"There's going to be a lot of death, human death. This time, they're targeting humans," LaBeouf said.

"It's going to be the craziest action movie ever made, or we failed," he added.